Monday, 13 June 2016

How to add Primary key into a new or existing table in SQL Server

Since a primary key is nothing but a constraint you can use ALTER clause of SQL to add a primary key into existing table. Though it's an SQL and database best practice to always have a primary key in a table, many times you will find tables which don't have a primary key. Sometimes, this is due to lack of a column which is both NOT NULL and UNIQUE (constraint require to be a primary key) but other times purely due to lack of knowledge or lack of energy. If you don't have a column which can serve as primary key you can use identity columns for that purpose. Alternatively, you can also combine multiple columns to create a composite primary keys e.g. you can combine firstname and lastname to create a primary key name etc.